From memories to forecasting: narrating imperial storm science

Throughout the nineteenth century, shipwrecks during tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean resulted in extended legal battles in the Marine Court of Enquiry in Calcutta. This chapter explores how cyclones became an object of scientific curiosity at the intersection of the imperial legal world and marine insurance. It explores the court records, consisting of legal depositions about the wrecks by mariners and insurance agents, ships’ logs with barometric readings, and diaries kept by the captain and pilots, which formed a significant archive for the colonial scientist Henry Piddington (1797–1858), made famous for coining the term ‘cyclone’. Piddington narrativized storm observations by condensing accounts from multiple sources and created a ‘storm card’ to finally develop a theory of tropical cyclones. His storm narratives and the accompanying visualization through the storm card shaped the very object – the cyclone – as a scientific category of investigation, transforming storm memories into a narrative science of forecasting.